Chapter Two: In which our heroine discovers that trumpet players should probably be licensed, and that mayors aren't particularly good conductors

One evening, just before the orchestra was to begin rehearsal, the maestro got an urgent call from home, saying his child was ill and needed to be taken to hospital right away. Not willing to cancel the rehearsal, the maestro asked the first player to walk in the door if he would take over the rehearsal while he drove his child to the hospital. That player, who happened to be the second trumpet player, readily agreed.

The rehearsal went as well as could be hoped, and everyone went home happy. Next week, the maestro was back on the podium, and the second trumpet player was back in his section, sitting beside the first trumpet player, who turned to him and said, "Where were you last week? I missed you."

I arrived at the church basement where we practice every Sunday afternoon only five minutes late. Not bad, considering I'd left ten minutes late because I was searching for my pants, which still had yet to be found. My stand partner, Drew, was just tuning her viola. A useless exercise, in my humble opinion, because it generally stayed in tune for five minutes, plus or minus four minutes and fifty five seconds. Usually minus.

I pulled my viola out of its case. Unlike Drew's, it was already in tune. It never got out of tune, at least as far as I could tell. Other people disagreed with me about this on occasion (actually, on many occasions, for example, just about every time I play a note), but to my ears it sounds fine. I sat down beside Drew and pulled out the music for the evening. We'd start with Richard Strauss' "Thus Spake Zarathustra," which ignorant plebes know only as the theme song to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The mayor was supposed to conduct the piece. Since the mayor had never in her life conducted anything more complicated than a city council meeting (and we know how well those go), our real conductor had got us to the point where we could play the piece without any conductor at all. I didn't have the heart to tell her that normally the only ones who paid any attention to her were the first desk violins and cellos, because a) they were the only ones (besides the first desk violas and second violins) who could see her (she being only five foot one in high heels, which she refused to wear) and b) the rest of us players were so engrossed in reading the individual notes on the page that the second we looked up to watch for her beat, we lost our place in the music.

"Mary Sue, can you play your g string? I think mine is out of tune," Drew asked as I sat down. Now that I think about it, that seems like an awfully risqué thing to say to someone, but at the moment, I took it literally and played my F#. She turned her peg to loosen the string.

"Wrong way," I told her. "Your string is flat, you need to raise it."

"It looks round to me," she said, eyeing the offending string carefully.

I sighed. "Not flat as in, flat as a board, but flat as in, too low in pitch. Just turn the peg the other way, Drew."

"What? What way?" she asked. "Just wait a minute. I think I forgot my pencil. I know I forgot my pencil."

She hung her viola by the scroll from the music stand and got up to get her pencil. That's another thing about Drew. She can't sit still for more than a minute, and three sentences is about the length of her conversation on any one topic.

Mary, the conductor (who we generally called Soccer Mom, because she had three kids in rep league soccer and boasted about it at length), stood on the podium and pointed to the first oboist. She obligingly produced something resembling an A. I say, resembling, because her pitch didn't match my A, and I've already told you my viola is always in tune. Drew returned with a shiny rock (I didn't really have time to look at it all that well, but it seemed to me that it was actually giving off light, rather than just reflecting it), picked up her instrument, and started to make the fake cat gut (all modern strings are steel) wail like a dead dog. Eventually, her g string approached the right pitch, but then there was a loud popping sound. I rolled my eyes and pulled my pencil out of my music bag.

"Oh, shit!" she said. "My d string popped." She turned to face Soccer Mom. "Sorry," she said. "I know I'm being a pain." She turned the peg that tuned her d string the wrong way, then the right way, then the wrong way again, plucking the string all the while to ascertain its pitch. "Sorry," she said again.

I really wish she'd just stop doing things that necessitated her saying, "Sorry," and be quiet and out of tune like all the rest of the violas. Really, with that need for the spotlight, she should have been a first violinist or a trumpet player. We viola players are quiet and demure and truly upstanding citizens, except for the fact that we play viola.

I mean, how do you get a viola section to play a passage "pianissimo?" Easy—you mark the passage "solo" and "fortissimo."

Anyhow, we finally got the orchestra tuned, and the right music in front of our faces. Always a trial, since Drew has to ask five times what we're playing, and I physically have to point out the place where we're starting, in this case, at the beginning. Not that hard really, since the whole piece is less than a page long, but I digress...

"Thus Spake Zarathustra" begins with five bars rest for the viola section, in which the bassoons and cellos play a very low tremelo which gradually gets louder. Then at some point, the brass section enters with their melody (why don't the violas ever get the melody, anyhow?), and finally, the entire orchestra comes in with a phrase that can only be explained as a "Ta Da!" And "Ta Da!" is at full volume.

The mayor got up on the podium, and started beating time. The cellos and bassoons began their low rumble.

And the mayor fainted dead away. She went down like a tree felled by a lumberjack. Boom! Her head hit the podium with a thunk.

Nobody noticed. The cellos and bassoons kept up their rumble. It was up to me to check and see if the mayor was all right, so I cautiously left my seat and poked her with my bow. She groaned, so I was certain she wasn't dead. I hastened back to my seat. It was almost time for...

Ta DA! The trumpets sitting just behind me blasted my eardrums, and in a nanosecond the orchestra, the church basement, and my lovely black pants were all gone. Oh wait. My pants had been missing since the beginning of this story, hadn't they?